With the upcoming update, Residence will provide even more options for setting criteria for students to be paired together during the batch assignment process. “Exact matching” allows your team to determine the most important criteria for having successful roommate matches, whereas “flexible matching” will provide your team with the ability to determine which answers should be […]

Career center professionals already know how important it is for students to get some type of professional experience before they graduate and move on to the world of working full-time. Whether it’s an internship or a part-time job in their desired field, students should certainly be doing something before graduation to dip their toes into the professional world. That being said, it’s not always easy for students to balance the stress of schoolwork with the added pressure of performing in a work environment. In order to help your students achieve a balance between succeeding in both areas, consider the following advice.

You’re confident that your college or university is providing students with an enriching, well-rounded education when it comes to academics, but are you sure you’re providing them with the life skills they’ll need once they graduate? A student can graduate with a 4.0 GPA, but if they don’t have a firm grasp on what it means to be an adult entering the “real world,” they are bound to face difficult times. Below are five topics you should incorporate into your school’s electives or campus workshops to ensure that your students are fully prepared to leave the comfortable college nest and excel in both their professional and personal lives.

Helping students pick a college major is one of the most important tasks of an academic advisor. On the one hand, you want to provide support to your students as they figure out what they want to do. On the other hand, you need to ensure that when they graduate, your students are prepared for what comes next. All students are different, and when you are advising them, you should not provide the same set of suggestions every time. The best thing you can do is ask questions to determine their individual priorities and move on from there.

In recent years, colleges and universities have been putting more emphasis on separating themselves from the outdated “dorm” image. A dorm is a building that students merely live in, whereas the residence hall of today is intended to be its own small community – a mini-ecosystem, almost, in which students can find comfort and support. So how do you create residence halls that maximally achieve this goal? Here are four suggestions to help.

Your campus culture is an imperative part of ensuring the best possible student experience. Creating an enriching campus community fosters emotional and intellectual growth, leading to the best possible student success rates (and ultimately, increased retention rates for your school.) While students should naturally keep their studies their primary focus, it’s also incredibly important for them to develop relationships with other students and have memorable, valuable social experiences to supplement their academic learning.

Like any experience, an internship is what you make of it. Don’t think of it just as a resume booster – recognize it for the valuable opportunity it is, and take it as seriously as you would a real job. There are several ways to make sure you’re optimizing the experience and getting the most possible out of your first exposure to your chosen career field.

If your career center is one of the 1,400 worldwide that uses CSM to connect students to potential employers, your students hopefully know how to utilize its basic features. Are you confident, though, that they know how to tap into the power of its lesser-known tools?

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) tend to be a little more difficult than traditional classrooms, both for students and for teachers. This is usually due to the lack of face-to-face interaction, which, for some students, can decrease motivation and make the class feel less authentic than a “real” in-person course. As a teacher, it can understandably be frustrating to detect this lack of interest or engagement. Thankfully, there are a few tricks you can utilize in this situation that will keep students involved and make the course more challenging.